Coorabell Hall Film Club

Wednesday 5 June

Local Hero

Food & drinks (Licensed) from 6.00PM
Movie starts at 7.30PM

Bill Forsyth put Scottish cinema on the map with this delightfully eccentric culture-clash comedy. Riffing on popular representations of Scottish life and folklore, Local Hero follows the Texas oil executive Mac (Peter Riegert), who is dispatched by his crackpot boss (Burt Lancaster) to the remote seaside village of Ferness in Scotland with orders to buy out the town and develop the region for an oil refinery. He is assisted in this venture by a young Scott named Danny (Peter Capaldi). But as business mixes with pleasure, Mac finds himself enchanted by both the picturesque community and its oddball citizens—and Texas starts to feel awfully far away. Packed with a near nonstop stream of droll one-liners and deadpan gags, this enchanting hit cult finds Forsyth surveying the idiosyncrasies of small-town life with considerable satirical verve, arriving at a sly commentary on conservation, corporate greed, and the legacies we leave behind.

The enduring affection and adulation for Local Hero stem from the way the film testifies, thematically and stylistically, to the impressive scale and subtlety of Forsyth’s filmmaking talent. While the work is deeply rooted both in Scottish culture and in filmic representations of Scotland, it also has a globally relevant environmental agenda. It is laugh-out-loud funny in its seemingly endless and effortless profusion of sight, sound, and dialogue gags but signs off with one of cinema’s saddest images of loneliness and longing. Acutely topical today, the movie is also deliberately mythical in its exploration of an archetypal dilemma: Can humankind simultaneously cultivate and conserve the natural world, and even if we can, are we truly willing to?